Portmill status

[Jim Meyer]

An attempt at closing the loop on this thread:

On 6/29/09 1:56 AM, C. Florian Ebeling wrote:
> Unfortunately, currently personal life has changed much and I will
> hardly be able to do any work on this in the next time. The source is
> up and readily available, so if anyone feels like digging into it,
> that is possible, and I will help via mail with any questions. I will
> pick up the work later there, or so I plan, but I don't know really
> when that will be possible.
> 
> Another thing that came up was the suggestion that it should be ported
> to mysql instead of couchdb. I would find that not very motivating,
> but it is certainly possible. Do you think all macports things should
> use mysql? I found couchdb actually a very inspiring technology, and
> it was part of my motivation to work on the thing in the first place.
> (This discussion is not really pressing now, give what I said above,
> but since it is a fundamental question, we can also discuss it now.)

I committed to work on this earlier if it wasn't rewritten in PHP/MySQL; 
I'm also curious about couchdb (and there's even a port to install it 
... excellent! ;) I'll start poking around the code and getting comfy 
with it in its current condition.

(An aside: installing couchdb requires erlang, which requires wxWidgets, 
which requires a billion media-related dependencies like libsdl, libogg, 
libvorbis, smpeg, etc. That's a really bloated install.)

I share Bill Siegrist's concern re: a billion fragmented technologies to 
manage overall. I also believe that (a) tethering things at the backend 
is a bad choice in the long run, (b) people volunteer in open source 
projects to play and enjoy, so fewer constraints are better, and (c) 
open source projects are good places to take risks, learn, then 
stabilize for the long term.

As I mentioned, I'll get comfy supporting the code in its current 
condition, learn a bit, talk with Florian, and we'll see where it goes 
from there.

Sound reasonable to the list?

--j